You’ve come up with the perfect tagline. It’s snappy, original, and inspirational. Not only that, you’ve built some strong messaging pillars to lift that thing up, to keep it held aloft for all the talent in the world to see. At its foundation, you’ve laid down some beautiful copy. Words like ‘innovative’, ‘impactful’, and ‘collaborative’ are strewn like flowers at an altar, brightening your brand with glimmers of motivation. In other words, it’s failproof.
But then you launch it.
Your employer brand bursts boldly into the open, appearing on social media, your website, posters, notebooks, pens, baseball caps, your friends’ LinkedIn feeds, your parents’ Facebook feeds. There’s a shimmer of applause.
Then nothing.
Weeks go by and the stats don’t lie. Instead of chucking a bull into a bath, you’ve dropped a pin into a pond. After a few days, it’s become buried in sediment and pebbles and deadlines and demands. Your people seem to have forgotten about it. Your target talent seem to have not registered its existence at all. The number of new applications to your company remain stubbornly stagnant, like an elderly relative after a large meal. Engagement with your social accounts shows no signs of increasing.
In other words, your employer brand has failed to resonate.
This is frustrating.
Time, money, hope, creativity, and a whole lot of effort have gone into it. So, why hasn’t it worked out as you’d expected?
1. You haven’t understood your target audience
From an attraction point of view, the first thing you need to know is who you’re targeting. And no, I don’t just mean ‘really talented, hardworking, qualified people’. I mean who exactly do you want to reach? Sales talent in Canada, healthcare workers in the UK, female engineers, Gen-Z software developers, part-time construction workers, experienced finance professionals. Your employee value proposition (EVP) might encompass one or one hundred different audiences like this. Ensuring your messaging acknowledges these talent groups is vital for ensuring an effective employer brand.
Once you’ve decided on your target talent groups, you need to know two core things about them:
Where to reach them
What to say to them
For point a, you need to understand which social media platforms they like spending their free time on and where they search for jobs. This way, you can ensure your brand-new brand will actually be seen.
For point b, you need to understand what they prioritise in a job, what their attitudes to work are, why they typically leave their roles, what companies they’re attracted to, and whether there are any broader trends or current affairs that might impact hiring them.
If you don’t take this information into account, it’ll be like holding a chess game in Wembley Stadium: wrong content + wrong setting = wrong audience. Or no audience at all.
For example, only 12% of drivers in the UK use LinkedIn to search for jobs - and less than 1% use it for leisure. If you want to hire drivers for your company, don’t use LinkedIn. Instead, bring your employer brand to life on online job boards such as Indeed, where 31.65% of drivers search for new roles.
Using tools such as Wisdom, GWI, LinkedIn Insights or even online articles will help you to truly understand your target audience.
2. There’s a mismatch between expectations and reality
Authenticity is key.
Sure, your employer brand can be aspirational. But it can’t be misleading. Don’t tell the world about your culture of career development if your progression ladders only have a single rung. This creates distrust, both from new starters and from current employees.
Making big, beautiful promises might increase the number of applications you receive. It might even boost footfall on your social accounts and careers site. But it will also skyrocket employee disengagement and hinder retention.
People will be less compelled to fly the flag internally - to spread the word and grind the gears - if they don’t truly believe in the message. So, make sure you listen to what they have to say about your employer brand. Circulate surveys. Host focus groups. Pester people by the water cooler. Gather insights into what people love and don’t love about working at the company. Then build your employer brand around these kernels of truth.
Once you’ve found out what employees enjoy about working at the company, you can shout these reasons from the rooftops, unashamedly. You can fashion bright, bold messages calling attention to these positives. And you can rest assured that your employer brand is rooted in reality. Meanwhile, you can also look at what you can do to boost employee experience, using the areas of improvement as a guide for where your employer brand needs to be in the future.
3. Failure to stand out from the crowd
There’s a tightrope to walk between being authentic and being exciting. Yes, you don’t want to create unrealistic expectations. But you also want to avoid creating no expectations at all.
One way to differentiate your employer brand is by paying close attention to point #1 in this article: your employer brand needs to accommodate all of the priorities of your target audiences - however, you can flex it specifically to different talent groups when it comes to LinkedIn and social posts, job listings, and pages on your careers site.
Another way to differentiate your employer brand is by paying close attention to point #2 in this article: by understanding what stands out to your employees, you’ll have an understanding of what might stand out to external talent. A big part of this is avoiding generic terms. Earlier, I wrote about an imaginary employer brand that used words such as ‘innovative’, ‘impactful’, and ‘collaborative’. One of the reasons this employer brand fails is through using these words. We’ve seen them before, many, many times. They litter careers sites, gush down LinkedIn feeds, and rain down on job descriptions. Be more specific, more creative, and more personal in the words you use. By listening to your people, you’ll pick up on language they’re using to describe your company, alongside more specific examples of how that language is lived and breathed. This will be a strong source of inspiration for creating an employer brand that truly stands out.
Finally, look at what other companies in your space are doing. LinkedIn Insights, Glassdoor and tools like Wisdom or GWI will help you discern who your biggest competitors for talent are. By analysing their tone of voice, messaging, visuals and social content you’ll be able to discern where the gaps are. Furthermore, by conducting this analysis, you’ll be able to ensure you’re not duplicating employer branding that already exists. With the commonality of words like ‘innovative’, ‘impactful’ and ‘collaborative’, it’s easily done.
So, to wrap things up, creating an employer brand that resonates is a difficult task. If you believe the rumours, apparently Rome took longer than a day to build. Isaac Newton knew nothing before a falling apple struck him with inspiration (this isn’t strictly true but bear with me).
Good things take time - and often failure - before they’re brought into existence. It’s no different with an employer brand. If yours doesn’t appear to have resonated yet, make sure you’re navigating the three points outlined in this blog, and then set it free into the world once more.
